The 4 questions that quietly changed everything about how I see myself
I didn't set out this year asking big questions. Honestly, I didn't really realize I was asking them at all until I kind of looked back and was like, oh. Oh, there they were the whole time.
And it's just been such an interesting year for that — not dramatic, not some massive pivot moment, just this slow, kind of quiet unraveling of things I thought I already knew about myself. And I think that's actually the version nobody talks about enough.
So here are the four questions I was unknowingly working through, and what I figured out — or at least started to figure out — on the other side of them.
Who am I as a driven career woman?
I think for a long time I had this idea in my head of what that was supposed to look like, and it was just... not quite me, you know? And so there was this weird friction between who I actually am and who I thought I was supposed to be. And what I keep coming back to is that I'm someone who builds things she believes in even when they don't make sense on paper yet, and who follows the breadcrumbs even when she can't see the whole path. And I think I've really started to let that be enough — like, actually enough, not just "enough for now."
Who am I now that I'm a mother?
I don't think I'm ever going to have a definition for this one, and honestly I've stopped wanting one. What I do know is that I want to be present more than not, and I want to be flexible, and I want my kids to see someone who genuinely loves what she does — and also genuinely loves being with them. And I think those things can coexist, even in the messy phases, even when it doesn't feel like it.
Who am I as a loving partner?
This one snuck up on me. My husband and I both have our own businesses, we have two little kids who are very much in the "interrupt every single sentence" phase, and somewhere in the middle of all of that we just kind of became two ships passing in the night. Not in a bad way, just in that way where life accumulates and suddenly you're like, when did we last actually have a conversation? And we did some really intentional work this year to reconnect, and it's been so, so good. And I think I just needed to treat my marriage the way I treat the things I'm building — with some actual intention and not just good vibes.
Who am I in my community and my family?
I live across the country from my whole family, and that's always going to be its own thing. And I spent a lot of years with this quiet guilt about it, like I was never doing enough, never showing up enough. And this year something just kind of... settled. I think I just accepted that showing up as much as I humanly can, given everything I'm building and everything I'm raising, is genuinely enough. I'm here. I'm connected. And the people who matter, they know.
None of these questions have a clean answer, and I don't think they're supposed to. But I'm realizing that just sitting with them, and actually letting myself work through them — that's kind of the whole thing.
Want more of this? I get into all of it in episode 141 of All Figured Out — the year's highs, the hard stuff, what came up in a somatic therapy session the day before I turned 36, and what I'd tell myself a year ago.
